Originally published in 1981, Eugene B. "Sledgehammer" Sledge's memoir of the fighting at Peleliu and Okinawa with the 1st Marine Division has become an enduring classic of World War II literature, forming the basis for the HBO miniseries The Pacific and prompting Studs Terkel to interview Sledge for The Good War. Based on notes Sledge secretly kept in a copy of the New Testament, With the Old Breed captures with utter simplicity and searing honesty the experience of a soldier in the fierce Pacific Theater. Here is what saved, threatened, and changed his life. Here too is the story of how he learned to hate and kill—and came to love—his fellow man.

"In all the literature on the Second World War, there is not a more honest, realistic or moving memoir than Eugene Sledge's. This is the real deal, the real war: unvarnished, brutal, without a shred of sentimentality or false patriotism, a profound primer on what it actually was like to be in that war. It is a classic that will outlive all the armchair generals' safe accounts of—not the 'good war'—but the worst war ever."—Ken Burns